Hannah Feldman
Blog Post 5

I have stumbled across a reason for strip mining, why companies thought it was a reasonable way to mine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr wrote an article on his father’s fight against strip mining, and it gives a bit of history on the situation. It starts with unions. In the sixties, there “were 114,000 unionized mine workers in West Virginia digging coal from tunnels and supporting the families and communities of Appalachia. Today, there are less than 11,000 miners in West Virginia taking the same amount of coal and only a fraction of them are unionized because the strip industry isn’t.” Strip mining requires heavy machinery that can do the work of many men. With more machines, fewer workers – union workers – were needed to mine the land. Non-union labor is cheaper, and having fewer workers to pay is cheaper, and companies certainly like a profit.

The initial reason for this practice to be thought up is explained as well: “The mining industry debuted strip mining in the 1940s in the Western States, to extract coal seams that lay a few feet below the surface and therefore inaccessible through traditional tunnel mining. To extract the wealth, all you needed was a bulldozer.” They were only thinking of immediate return, with no eye towards the future of the land.

Well, here’s the future:

The most shocking statistic I have read is from the same site. Strip miners set off 3,000 pounds of dynamite A DAY in West Virginia. Added up, it is the size of the Hiroshima bomb each week. The US Department of Energy estimates that 70,000 people died from the initial blast (Source ). Buildings were destroyed; everything was destroyed. If that’s how much one bomb did, and to humans and buildings, imagine the effects of one of those each week on the trees and natural elements.

Photo credit: Kent Kessinger

Hannah Feldman
Post 3

Coal is already generating protestors because it is nonrenewable, but what not many people know is how coal is mined. Strip mining, a type of surface mining, is one method coal companies use to extract coal from the land. Strip mining is basically razing the vegetation in an area, then drilling holes and blowing up the ground, and then actually mining the coal, as described by Thinkquest . At times, whole mountaintops are simply blown off to reach the coal. Why? Well, according to iLovemountains.org , “Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.” Verifying that, Appalachian Voices says, “although coal production rose 32 percent between 1987 and 1997, mining jobs dropped by 29 percent over the same period.” So, it’s cheaper. Well, coal mining companies may lose a bit of money, but everyone loses the oxygen those trees produced, and simply the beautiful views and landscapes they provided. Over 450 mountains have been destroyed in Appalachia so far, and there are myriad more surface mining permits granted for the area.

There are laws in place to regulate strip mining, but they are not well enforced. “While reclamation efforts such as stabilization and revegetation are required for mountaintop removal sites, in practice, state agencies that regulate mining are generous with granting waivers to coal companies. Most sites receive little more than a spraying of exotic grass seed” says ilovemountains.org. Mountains are not just grass. What about the forests that used to thrive? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither do forests grow back in a day, especially not hardwoods. According to PBS , “300,000 acres of hardwood forest in West Virginia have been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.” West Virginia is the Mountain State, and hopefully it stays that way. I also strongly encourage you to go here and see your connection to this disastrous practice.

Note: Hold on tight, topic is shifting! The reason I chose the topic of deforestation in the beginning was because I remembered an article I read a year ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer about deforestation and how Pennsylvania is one of the better states in reforestation efforts. So, I guess I should have realized that PA doesn’t really need help! However, in my research, I have stumbled upon the problems outlined above in Appalachia, and have decided to focus on the negative effects of strip mining and mountaintop removal.